Blog Comments & nofollow to follow backlink ratio

[tomfifteen]

Hello

I have a website with 2000 nofollow links backlinks and about 20 follow links. It is currently ranking 11^th on Google. The websites that are outranking it have lower ranking stats and in some cases only 2 follow links.

Most of the nofollow links are blog comments, could this be what is dragging down my stats.

The only factor my website is worst on is the number of server requests per load, which is 194 as it is a theme.

Blog comments can be very difficult to remove; I created these several years ago before I knew too much about SEO. Most of them are on other websites in same niche.

Would I be best to ask website owners to delete my comments or restart on a new domain.

Thanks

Rob

[Highland]

While Penguin changed a lot of things about links hurting you, nothing that I have seen anywhere has suggested that nofollowed links are harmful. Google gives these safe harbor, more or less. The only exception would be if you were spamming and get reported as such.

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Hi Rob,

The general rule of thumb is don't worry (too much) about no-follow links, although there are times to also ignore this as well.

Key factors that will be making a difference, are the content and the do-follow links. You can't just look at the back-links as the reason why you aren't ranking well.

Without seeing them, I would be tempted to just not worry about the no-followed links, and concentrate on:

1. Making sure the do-follow links are of good quality and don't fall into the spammy category, and
2. Look at your content and how good it is - does it match up to the competition?

It never hurts to do some competition analysis to see how your competitors are beating you.

-Andy